The state of the cloud in 2016: DevOps, Docker momentum grows as hybrid hits its stride

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Hybrid cloud adoption has grown significantly while DevOps and Docker uptake continues to explode, according to the latest RightScale State of the Cloud research report.

The report, which surveyed more than 1,000 technical professionals, found that the more things change, the more they stay the same with regards to the overall trends pervading the cloud industry. Hybrid cloud adoption has gone up from 58% in 2015 to 71% among respondents, with private cloud going up from 63% to 77%. Similarly, DevOps adoption rose to almost three quarters (74%), with Docker uptake more than doubling from 13% last year to 27% in 2016.

Four in five companies polled have at least dipped their toes in cloudy waters, with 29% heavy users, 25% with apps running, and 26% on their first project. Only 9% said they had no plans to move off-premise. With this maturity, RightScale argues, the job role of cloud architect has risen with it. 40% of respondents in that role see themselves as a cloud architect, compared to 44% for IT architect and 16% development architect.

The number of clouds companies are using is also on the up; organisations are on average leveraging three public clouds and three private clouds, while running applications on 1.5 public clouds and 1.7 private clouds and experimenting on a further 1.5 and 1.3 respectively. Smaller businesses are more likely to go all-in on public, with 24% compared to 10% for enterprise, while the most popular enterprise option was for 20% public and 80% private workloads (39%, compared to 22% SMB).

Elsewhere, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was used by 57% of those polled, unsurprisingly making it the most popular cloud provider by far, yet the year over year figures show minimal growth, as enterprise usage increases but small business usage drops. Microsoft Azure infrastructure as a service grew from 12% of respondents in 2015 to 17% in 2016, while platform as a service rose four points to 13% year over year.

These figures correlate with recent analysis on the cloud infrastructure market from Synergy Research, which argued that despite AWS having a yawning gap over the rest of the field, other vendors – in particular Microsoft – were growing at a faster pace.

“The 2016 State of the Cloud survey shows that cloud adoption is growing and hybrid cloud adoption has now hit its stride,” said Kim Weins, RightScale VP marketing, in a company blog post. “The strong growth in the use of private cloud, combined with the ubiquity of public cloud, means that a super-majority of organisations are now operating in a hybrid environment.”

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James is editor of CloudTech, with a passion for how technology influences business and several Mobile World Congress events under his belt. James has interviewed a variety of leading figures in his career, from former Mafia boss Michael Franzese, to Steve Wozniak, and Jean Michel Jarre. James can be found tweeting at @James_T_Bourne.

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